<p>Edad - do you have data to refute my assertion about PV panels on individual home’s roofs, and how much of those homes’ energy needs would be met, and to support your claim of “several states” worth of area needed?</p>
<p>UCLA; Your comments give the impression that I am somehow against alternative forms of energy and don’t believe in global warming; thus am trying to make excuses. Let me clarify 3 simple points to qualify my statements.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I do believe that global warming is happening. I don’t believe that mankind is a major contributor, but that is irrelevant to my argument. My argument has to do with the; “Better safe than sorry” attitude.</p></li>
<li><p>Economically, the “Better safe than sorry” argument can be cost prohibitive economically to many countries and it can cause political stability issues. Yes, places like isreal can prosper without oil, but as you said it required aid from the USA and other countries. Unless you are going to make the entire planet 1 giant econo-political system, you can’t totally subsidize all the countries that subsist on fossil fuel as an income source or others like india or china who might not be able to afford other forms.</p></li>
<li><p>I believe that the way to convert to “REAL” alternative forms of energy; not this ethanol and bio-fuel crap; is through the industry, economics, and technology. DO NOT LET GOVERNMENTS GET INVOLVED OR BE IN CHARGE!!! That is my biggest point!!!</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I love the fact that oil is at $100 a barrel. I love the fact that gasoline is at $2.80 a gallon. It makes the cost of research and development of alternative fuels more affordable. The industry will find the alternative forms of energy because the consumer will want it. (NOT BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT DICTATES IT). Once electricity can be made in large amounts efficiently, fossil fuels can be gradually be phased out. The problem with electric car and other electric replacements, is that we use fossil fuels to make our electricity. Taking the fossil fuels out of the cars and using it to make more electricity might be a little cleaner, but it doesn’t fix the problem. In theory; if we left the cars, buses, trucks, airplanes, and ships alone to use the fossil fuels that they are using; and stopped using fossil fuels to generate our electricity and fun our industrial networks around the world, we could reduce our fossil fuel usage substantially. MOST reports show that approximately 60% of fossil fuel usage is to generate electricity and run factories and other industrial usage.</p>
<p>So, I am very much in favor or alternative energy sources. NOT because I am worried about global warming. I personally don’t think we are a major contributor. I am in favor because it is better economically, will create jobs, is cleaner overall for the planet, (Not global warming related), and is better technologically. (Currently, we waste a lot of energy trying to create energy). </p>
<p>Of course, the ONLY argument to this method, is by the alarmists who believe that mankind is indeed a major contributor to global warming. Letting the market and industry replace fossil fuels will take time. The alarmist side; (I don’t know what else to call them) believe that we have to do something to rid ourselves of fossil fuels immediately. Our country and planet can not under any circumstance convert away from fossil fuels immediately and maintain any similar form of standard of living or quality of life that we have currently. Even in the so called 3rd world countries. Not unless; A) We pool all world wide resources and become one econo-political U.N. based world. (I pray that never happens). 2) We have some Einstein or extra-terrestrial type epiphany of knowledge on how to create energy that is totally outside of our current realm of thinking. (I personally think this will happen. Not extra-terrestrial, but a break through in physics outside of our normal comprehension). That is the only way we can afford to immediately get away from the use of fossil fuels.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there are a lot of political pressure to just ALTER our current methodology. I.e. More efficient cars, cleaner use of fossil fuels, bio-fuels, ethanol, etc… These are all in place because of politics and money. It allows companies like Archer Daniels Midland and others to pretend to help with energy issues while reaping large profits. That’s why politics have to be taken out of the picture. Including things like the Kyoto agreement.</p>
<p>Mass transit can make a difference in many areas, but not where I live. There is not central flow of commuters. People live and travel to different locations. We would need to bulldoze and start over."</p>
<p>Wouldn’t there be a certain benefit to finding solutions that fit each community, even if they aren’t the same solutions? I guess I’m sensitive to this because ZG did an award winning project about the impact of auto-overload on our local environment. She worked on it for almost a year, collected a vast amount of data, and really opened my eyes.</p>
<p>I put my own faith in the evil private sector. I think it will be a clever entrepreneur (or team of them) who figure this out for us, save the world, and get really rich and employ lots of people and make a lot of people a lot of money in the stock market. Then of course they’ll become a “big corporation” and universally reviled for being the source of all our problems . . .</p>
<p>Zoosermom - the auto-centered lifestyle of Americans didn’t just happen, either. It’s the result of uniform zoning and building codes adopted across the country in the early 50’s which haven’t really been changed much ever since. And no, it’s not a coincidence that our existing system of streetcars and trolleys was destroyed in the decades to follow. This stuff didn’t just “happen” - it was planned. </p>
<p>We can plan to change it, too. It just requires the will. And that will require overcoming the anti-change mindset fostered by the corporate PR guys and their viral marketing techniques which have convinced so many people (including posters here on CC) that anything which would change our way of life in a manner which would threaten the profits of existing businesses is wacky, hysterical, unAmerican, or whatever.</p>
<p>I work in municipal planning and various efforts to reduce our reliance on autos are being discussed and tried out. But a lot of the time those efforts are metowith much of the same sneering criticism as you see here regarding anything else that might result in [shudder] change. It’s never easy to get stuff done that threatens the profits of existing large corporations. They can and do fight to protect themselves - no surprise there.</p>
<p>Mammal - big corporations are responsible for our current energy consuming, auto-centered lifestyle. I’m not saying that it was evil of them to do that (although some of the tactics were less than above-board) but the fact is, the unintended consequence of their profit motive is choking us today, and their defense of their profits will hinder our efforts to solve the problem.</p>
<p>Never forget the Tobacco companies.</p>
<p>Christcorp - “Unless you are going to make the entire planet 1 giant econo-political system”</p>
<pre><code> BINGO!!!
</code></pre>
<p>dtex50. I hope that never happens.</p>
<p>As far as mass transit goes; it is fine in urban areas. That may help a little. But a vast amount of the United States isn’t Japan. Many travel 30-50 miles one way to work. Many aren’t on the eastern seaboard. Many; especially west of the Mississippi river; not including California are in areas where other than a bus system in a large city like Dallas, Denver, SLC, etc… mass transit can not and will not work.</p>
<p>kluge, if you want to understand the potential impact of solar energy, I suggest you read the Scientific American article. Just to summarize: if the efficiency of the new cadmium telluride collector films can be substantially improved, then we could theoretically replace 1/3 of our current energy consumption with solar arrays covering 30,000 square miles. The requirements to store and distribute that power are equally impressive. </p>
<p>Clearly, large scale use of solar is impractical. I would agree that there are limited uses. For those of you who live in warm, sunny locations, solar is feasible for heating swimming pools, domestic hot water and for replacing some household electric consumption. Please also remember that household energy use is well less than 10% of our total consumption so to achieve even a minimal impact we need to see a high percentage of households self sufficient with solar. As long as hardly anyone uses household solar, we can require the electric companies to buy back the excess and serve as a energy storage bank. If a substantial percentage of households in an area do use solar, then that will not work and we will need to develop massive and expensive storage systems. Maybe solar is not equivalent to a spit in the ocean. It is more like a bath tub of water in a swimming pool.</p>
<p>Interesting piece in this morning’s paper heralding the “unequivocal” rise in the earth’s temperature but also buried at the end the tidbit that the highest average temperature in the last 10 years was actually 1998. Also noted buried deep that the US has actually tapered a bit in this decade. Also alluded to the averages being crunched as going back to the 1950s. Could some science wiz please explain to me how measurements a half-century ago are comparable to measurements today. Surely, we are not using the same instruments in the same locations. If nothing else, urban and suburban landscapes have changed considerably and the simple presence of buildings ups the measured temperature. I just really don’t understand how this stuff can be portrayed as so precise and accurate. These are human measurements, made by different humans using different human-built instruments.</p>
<p>What still bothers me is the sense that we are being pushed very quickly to adopt drastic measures and accept that the science is unequivocal and complete. This argument appears to be very much invigorated by a sense of moral imperative, as well, which makes simple questioning of the findings socially uncceptable. That’s just not a good situation.</p>
<p>I tend to question any movement that is setting forth a “do it now or die” agenda.</p>
<p>We have been able to measure temperatures accurately for a long, long time and there is a long history of temperature and other climate data. There is no doubt that temperatures have increased recently. We also know that there have been large and fairly rapid changes in the past. We also know that CO2 emissions have increased due to man’s activities. The causal connection is much less certain.</p>
<p>Well, my dad used to take temperature readings from our back porch and send them into the US Geological Survey. He used what I recall to be a plain old store bought thermometer. I don’t believe he recorded time of day. And he’d have to squint and check the level of mercury. It was certainly not digital.And as I recall there was a tall stand of trees that cast this porch in shade that got cut down when another house went in. Wouldn’t this affect the readings? Is this the type of completely accurate historical data we are relying upon? My dad is a good guy but not infallible.</p>
<p>These are no doubt stupid questions but I really wonder about this.</p>
<p>I don’t think your question is stupid at all. In fact it brings up additional questions. The US National Weather Service accepts and analyzes data from home weather stations. The program is called COOP and there are approximately 11,000 contributors. Most are volunteer weather buffs. It does make you wonder how reliable or useful this data is. Your point about microclimates is also interesting. Changes in local land use, vegetation and construction could easily confuse an analysis of trending in that area.</p>
<p>Personally, I have no doubt that the researchers can come up with fairly accurate overall temperature trending. One thing I would like to see is an understandable analysis of weather variation. There is a common myth that global warming is associated with weather extremes. Certainly we have always had extremes with years of high or low temperatures, excessive rainfall, droughts, tornados, hurricanes, etc. I wonder if there is any way to develop some measures to determine if in fact the extremes are becoming more extreme.</p>
<p>I’d love to find some understandable descriptions of the methodologies used to come up with the historical trends and models of the future. I saw Incovenient Truth, of course, and was annoyed by the graphs which looked as if they were tweaked to achieve maximum scare effect. This really is a fascinating topic.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, when I was in DC I tried it a few times then went back to Metro. To each his own, I suppose. Either way, slugging is better than single drivers, but worse than having good mass transit.</p>
<hr>
<p>edad,</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>All of my economic study of credits has not shown this to be the case. Source?</p>
<hr>
<p>Christcorp,</p>
<p>Actually, one political system could have some serious benefits. You’d reduce the number of wars, if IR theorists are correct.</p>
<p>But anyway, I don’t agree with this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Governments SHOULD be involved, at the very least. Subsidies aimed in the right direction could potentially create further incentive to continue down paths that would otherwise not be gone down because of low/no net present value calculations on the part of the investors. The market will not go down all paths, even if there is potential benefit, if the risk is too high (I study risk management and did work on it for LG). Governments can reduce the risk valuation by offering subsidies. </p>
<p>And my second question is: What do we do for those who can’t afford technology transitions? No matter how good a new technology is, without an economy of scale, it will be EXPENSIVE when you first start selling it (look at DVD players and HDTVs when they first came out.)</p>
<p>Mammal, there’s a pretty clear discussion of this at [Temperature</a> record of the past 1000 years - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years]Temperature”>Temperature record of the last 2,000 years - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Edad, the SA article is a classic example of asking an extreme question in order to get an extreme answer, IMHO. PV will always be a “margin” source. (It doesn’t generate at night, etc.) But PV generates most at the peak demand time - summer afternoons. If we boosted PV from a fraction of a percent of US power supply to just 10% we would eliminate much more than 10% of our pollution - CO2 and otherwise, because that’s when our least efficient fossil fuel plants (peakers) are brought online. And perhaps the best thing about PV is that the factors affecting conventional power sources which militate in favor of building huge, megawatt-level powerplants in distant locations and then transporting it hundreds of miles to the end users - don’t exist. Massively dispersed energy production on the kilowatt level is far prefarable for numerous reasons - and is possible, even easier, with PV in a way that it’s not possible with other power sources.</p>
<p>So moving the goalposts by saying “Well, it’s just too much trouble to replace a third of our power needs with solar, so we might as well do nothing” is not, in my opinion, a rational response. 10% is doable without massive centralized powerplants, using the private sector and current technology with a few simple policy initiatives, and would have a disproportionate impact on pollution of all sorts - not just greenhouse gases. </p>
<p>So why aren’t we doing it?</p>
<p>kluge,
Living in California gives you a warped perspective. Most of us live in a less temperate climes. Our furnaces are blasting away a large percentage of the year. It was cloudy all day today but even if it had been bright sunshine that would not have done much of anything to heat my house. I would be surprised to see solar increase from the current few hundredths of a percent to even 2 or 3%. By the time we could afford to implement all that use of solar, our population and energy demands will have increased much more. By the time we blink, world energy consumption will more than offset that improvement. It is not that solar is worthless, but it just doesn’t seem to have much potential make a significant impact.</p>
<p>It is so warm that I am sitting in my car without shoes or a jacket- instead of the house ( because it is too hot- & Im not just talkin’ temp)</p>
<p>* No! I am not menopausal why do you ask? 
*</p>
<p>Lawyers Embrace U.S. Climate Practice at $700 an Hour (Update1)</p>
<p>By Cynthia Cotts
Enlarge Image/Details</p>
<p>Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) – Lawyers are becoming some of the best-paid environmentalists.</p>
<p>Twenty of the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms have started practices advising companies on climate change, according to a Bloomberg survey of the firms’ Web sites. The attorneys help clients finance clean-energy projects and lobby Congress, typically billing $500 to $700 an hour.</p>
<p>Firms including Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Heller Ehrman and Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton joined the global warming cause as real-estate and structured-finance attorneys lost jobs to the worst U.S. housing slump in 27 years. The move into climate-change law is gaining traction as Congress considers a mandatory carbon market to curb greenhouse gas emissions.</p>
<p>``Since the elections last November, climate change has had a higher profile as a political issue,‘’ said Paul Gutermann, co- leader of Washington-based Akin Gump’s group, which comprises 50 of the firm’s 1,023 attorneys.
Gutermann's team is helping clients including PG&E Corp. push U.S. lawmakers to establish a market that uses so-called carbon credits to penalize heavy polluters financially. Senators John Warner and Joseph Lieberman introduced a bill inspired by Europe's carbon market, and attorneys predict some legislation will pass after President George W. Bush, who opposes mandatory caps on emissions, leaves office in a year.
Global warming, driven by heat-trapping gases, is causing Arctic ice to melt and sea levels to rise, a United Nations panel of scientists said last year.
International Action
International reaction has sparked interest in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, making energy use more efficient and adding to non-polluting power sources.
Baker & McKenzie, a Chicago-based firm with 3,335 lawyers, was a pioneer, creating a climate-change group a decade ago. It became profitable after two years, said Richard Saines, who heads the U.S. part of the practice.
The 60-lawyer team brought in estimated revenue of $15 million to $20 million in 2007, Saines said. The firm's total revenue in 2006 was $1.52 billion, according to the trade magazine American Lawyer.
We saw this as one of the key international-law issues that would affect U.S.-based multinationals,'' Saines said.And that is now the case.''
Saines and others wouldn't disclose how much they bill.
Hourly rates for climate-change partners at the biggest law firms in the largest U.S. cities are typically $500 to $700, said Chuck Wehland, an environmental partner at Washington-based Jones Day, which started a practice in 2001.
Lawyers' Fees
In the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, attorneys more often charge $300 to $500, said Rick Glick, president of the American College of Environmental Lawyers. The range is in line with fees for attorneys in other practice areas, said Edward Zaelke, a partner in the 28-person renewable-energy practice at New York- based Chadbourne & Parke.
PG&E paid Akin Gump $400,000 for lobbying Congress in the first half of 2007, according to a federal disclosure statement. Not all the activity was climate-related and the team did more than lobby, Gutermann said. He declined to elaborate.
Companies in all U.S. sectors are turning to lawyers to help them build systems to monitor, report and verify carbon credits, lawyers say.
The world carbon-trading market tripled to about $30 billion between 2005 and 2006, according to the World Bank. Such a market in the U.S. may reach as much as $300 billion by 2020, Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said in U.S. House testimony last year.
European Model
The model proposed by Warner, a Virginia Republican, and Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, is similar to the European Union's emissions program. Heavy polluters must buy credits to comply, while cleaner companies can profit by selling them.
The idea is you let the people who are doing the polluting find the most efficient way to reduce pollution,'' said Robert Zwirb, a derivatives lawyer at New York-based Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft.If one utility can do it more cheaply than another, they engage in a trade. It's similar to swaps, only instead of dealing with interest rates, you're dealing with greenhouse gases.''
Akin Gump started its group two months ago with lawyers from existing practices expert on the environment, energy litigation, investments, project finance and public policy. San Francisco- based Heller Ehrman created its multidisciplinary team a year ago. Sheppard Mullin started a 50-member practice in May.
Growing Market
Building on existing clients, Los Angeles-based Sheppard Mullin has produced a ``substantial influx of work'' on land use, compliance and energy projects, said Randolph Visser, who heads a climate group comprised of 50 of the firm's 517 lawyers.</p>
<p>Customers include transportation companies in the Port of Los Angeles and FirmGreen Energy Inc., a closely held Newport Beach, California, developer of clean technology that the law firm is helping to negotiate a $25 million investment by Morgan Stanley.</p>
<p><code>These are evolving marketplaces that require scrutiny by law firms to make sure we are in compliance and to take advantage of marketing opportunities,‘’ said FirmGreen Chief Executive Officer Steven Wilburn.</code>If you just look at the hourly rate, it seems hard to justify. But if you look at the overall business plan, it’s a cost you have to plan for.‘’ Wilburn would not disclose how much FirmGreen pays attorneys.</p>
<p>Climate-change attorneys also advise private-equity firms and hedge funds on clean-energy projects.</p>
<p>Energy Investments</p>
<p>Worldwide investments in sustainable energy sources such as wind, solar and water power rose 43 percent to $70.9 billion in 2006, according to a UN report.</p>
<p>Rest of article in today’s Bloomberg</p>
<p>Since I work for a company that provides technical services to the legal industry: it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good on at least one industry.</p>
<p>ran across the complete link not listed a couple previous posts, for those interested.</p>
<p>[Bloomberg.com:</a> News](<a href=“Bloomberg Politics - Bloomberg”>Bloomberg Politics - Bloomberg)</p>